Now that We Shall Wake's demo is out, and we've taken time to organize, I think it's time I laid out our battle plans.

Right now we're doing a ton of planning. We have a document we're all working on, and I especially have been writing down where we're going with this. I've laid out a timeline for about 40% of the game's actual development, but a lot of it will come down to how fast we can get our models and other resources - which is hard when your budget is zero dollars.

And that's okay. We don't need help. We've already proven this. We're going to prove you can make a good game without a budget of 1.6 million dollars. In fact, I want to prove you can make an excellent, fun game for zero dollars.

Our game won't be this years best cinematic experience, because I think that's silly. I want to make a game that has a deep, fun, and enjoyable combat system with a fun dungeon generator to use it in. We want cool characters, and I want you to have cold chills every time a boss walks onto the screen. They will get steadily harder, and cooler looking. It'll be great.

A lot of you may still be confused on what we're making - so I'll lay it out. It'll be taking Dark Cloud elements and putting them together with Devil May Cry. Which means the game will center around exploring dungeons (which is what the tower is) and synthesizing items - but also since it's DMC, it will have an absolutely crazy combat system. We've already laid this out too, so it's just a matter of me practicing my animation skills and putting it together.

About every 20 floors you'll encounter a boss - where there will be about 100 floors. However, each floor will take around 10 minutes to get through assuming you don't rush through. In which case I'd imagine it take around 5 minutes. I'll be designing the dungeon generator to make simple puzzles on some floors so that you can't simply just find the door - and along with this the dungeons will have a ton of corridors and dead ends to get lost in. On top of the smart AI trying to savagely hunt you down in packs to kill you.

We'll also have save stations, kind of like Metroid, where they'll be located in their own room every few floors. It'll be up to you to find them though.

So what are we doing now? Right now, Daniel is making our new physics engine which utilizes Bullet, so that we can add more fancy things to how the game plays - like ragdolls and the like so that we can rip arms off of characters and such with grab moves. It's gonna be cool. Not only this, but I hope to add support for premade maps for boss rooms (which will also open the game to forms of modding down the road)

I've been writing down new gameplay ideas, and plan to totally enhance the movement system I've been calling AutoMotion. Allowing for back flips, front flips, better dashes, better wall running, and better, more flashy teleporting. We're also going to be adding some new particle effects for this also.

I also completed gutted the combat engine seen in the last demo. It was really shaky, and had a ton of bugs due to it being made in such a short time. If you played the demo, you probably noticed how smooth and intuitive the movement was in comparison to the combat. This for me is unacceptable, so I plan on completely retooling it.

When school settles down, I'll be starting on a debug console as well so that I can make some developer functions to make better cutscenes too - and I'll also be looking into using Kinect for motion capturing animations.

Ivan will be starting on our new models soon after we finalize some new designs. We're looking for a concept artist to help out, and if you think you could do well for us, please do feel free to contact me.

That's all for now. I'll try and make a blog post at least once a week to update you on progress from now on - so be sure to check in every once in a while. Take care everyone. :)